As we start to fill-up up our Netflix queues with classic horror flicks in preparation for Halloween, we realize the greatest villains of the genre still hold power over our adolescent selves. We still can't say Candyman in the mirror and clowns will always be scary, but what about the average joes who play the leading men in our nightmares? Sometimes it helps to disassociate and think of Freddie Krueger waiting in line at the DMV. Spurred by the recent release of Gunnar Hansen's (a.k.a Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre) memoir titled Chain Saw Confidential, we decided to "pull off the mask" of our favorite villains of horror.
Leatherface — Gunnar Hansen
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We skipped a lot of early morning classes in college, but perhaps we would've be scared straight if Leatherface was our English professor. The actor turned professor quit the biz to teach freshman English at University of Texas. Can you imagine the strapping six-foot three Hansen discussing the thematic resonance of Don Quixote? While Hansen spends most of his days in a small coastal town in Maine, he recently ventured back into acting, playing bit cameos in such classics as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and Texas Chainsaw 3D.
Jason Vorhees — Ari Lehman
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Ari Lehman looks like a mix of street magician and the sexy sax man — the stuff nightmares of made of. He also holds the distinct honor of playing the first Jason Vorhees in the original Friday the 13th. As it turns out, creeping out generations of children is not his only talent, as he is accomplished jazz musician and studied classical music and jazz piano at both Berklee School of Music and NYU. His passion for pounding the keys led him to tour with prominent reggae and African music groups and eventually led to him starting his own band — "First Jason," whose sound "hits you over the head with an anvil being swung at 1000 miles an hour by the metal gods."
Michael Myers — Tony Moran
Albert L. Ortega/Wireimage
After slashing his way through a couple of teenagers as Michael Meyers in Halloween, Tony Moran found himself making mincemeat out of high mortgage rates as an actor-turned broker. He shared his passion for acting with his actress sibling, Erin Moran of Happy Days, and did a number of guest appearances in The Waltons and CHIPS and then quit at age 30. Turns out, Michael Myers had such emotional depth it required three actors to play him, including Nick Castle and Tommy Lee Wallace. Since Moran wasn't anxious to wear the Michael mask again, his footage from the first film was used again in the sequel.
Freddy Krueger — Robert Englund
WENN
Robert Englund is the Kevin Bacon of horror villains. The man has literally worked with everyone in the business and has an IMDB credit list longer than our tax return. Before he donned the striped crewneck and switchblade gloves, he was briefly considered to play the part of Han Solo in Star Wars and even had Mark Hamill bumming on his couch. After playing bit parts on various shows and a recurring role on V, he took on the role of Freddy for three consecutive films and continues to work steadily today.
Chucky — Brad Dourif
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It takes a Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee to truly capture the demonic essence of a possessed doll. Character actor Brad Dourif has worked with some of the directing greats over the course of his career. He got his big break on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, worked with David Lynch in Dune and Blue Velvet, played a slimy villain in the Lord of The Rings trilogy and appeared in several Werner Herzog films. Like Hansen, Dourif also dabbled in teaching, leading acting and directing classes at Columbia University before becoming the voice of Chucky in all of the Child's Play films. Which leads us to wonder if there's a connection between playing psychopathic villains and academia.
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A decade-long gap between sequels could leave a franchise stale but in the case of Men in Black 3 it's the launch pad for an unexpectedly great blockbuster. The kooky antics of Agent J (Will Smith) and Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) don't stray far from their 1997 and 2002 adventures but without a bombardment of follow-ups to keep the series in mind the wonderfully weird sensibilities of Men in Black feel fresh Smith's natural charisma once again on full display. Barry Sonnenfeld returns for the threequel another space alien romp with a time travel twist — which turns out to be Pandora's Box for the director's deranged imagination.
As time passed in the real world so did it for the timeline in the world of Men in Black. Picking up ten years after MIB 2 J and K are continuing to protect the Earth from alien threats and enforce the law on those who live incognito. While dealing with their own personal issues — K is at his all-time crabbiest for seemingly no reason — the suited duo encounter an old enemy Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) a prickly assassin seeking revenge on K who blew his arm off back in the '60s. Their street fight is more of a warning; Boris' real plan is to head back in time to save his arm and kill off K. He's successful prompting J to take his own leap through the time-space continuum — and team up with a younger K (Josh Brolin) to put an end to Boris plans for world domination.
Men in Black 3 is the Will Smith show. Splitting his time between the brick personalities of Jones and Brolin's K Smith struts his stuff with all the fast-talking comedic style that made him a star in yesteryears. In present day he's still the laid back normal guy in a world of oddities — J raises an eyebrow as new head honcho O (Emma Thompson) delivers a eulogy in a screeching alien tongue but coming up with real world explanations for flying saucer crashes comes a little easier. But back in 1969 he's an even bigger fish out water. Surprisingly director Barry Sonnenfeld and writer Etan Cohen dabble in the inherent issues that would spring up if a black gentlemen decked out in a slick suit paraded around New York in the late '60s. A star of Smith's caliber may stray away from that type of racy humor but the hook of Men in Black 3 is the actor's readiness for anything. He turns J's jokey anachronisms into genuine laughs and doesn't mind letting the special effect artists stretch him into an unrecognizable Twizzler for the movie's epic time jump sequence.
Unlike other summer blockbusters Men in Black 3 is light on the action Sonnenfeld utilizing his effects budget and dazzling creature work (by the legendary Rick Baker) to push the comedy forward. J's fight with an oversized extraterrestrial fish won't keep you on the edge of your seat but his slapstick escape and the marine animal's eventual demise are genuinely amusing. Sonnenfeld carries over the twisted sensibilities he displayed in small screen work like Pushing Daisies favoring bizarre banter and elaborating on the kookiness of the alien underworld than battle scenes. MIB3's chase scene is passable but the movie in its prime when Smith is sparring with Brolin and newcomer Michael Stuhlbarg who steals the show as a being capable of seeing the future. His twitchy character keeps Smith and the audience on their toes.
Men in Black 3 digs up nostalgia I wasn't aware I had. Smith's the golden boy of summer and even with modern ingenuity keeping it fresh — Sonnenfeld uses the mandatory 3D to full and fun effect — there's an element to the film that feels plucked from another era. The movie is economical and slight with plenty of lapses in logic that will provoke head scratching on the walk out of the theater but it's also perfectly executed. After ten years of cinematic neutralizing the folks behind Men in Black haven't forgotten what made the first movie work so well. After al these years Smith continues to make the goofy plot wild spectacle and crazed alien antics look good.
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The first and most important thing you should know about Paramount Pictures’ Thor is that it’s not a laughably corny comic book adaptation. Though you might find it hokey to hear a bunch of muscled heroes talk like British royalty while walking around the American Southwest in LARP garb director Kenneth Branagh has condensed vast Marvel mythology to make an accessible straightforward fantasy epic. Like most films of its ilk I’ve got some issues with its internal logic aesthetic and dialogue but the flaws didn’t keep me from having fun with this extra dimensional adventure.
Taking notes from fellow Avenger Iron Man the story begins with an enthralling event that takes place in a remote desert but quickly jumps back in time to tell the prologue which introduces the audience to the shining kingdom of Asgard and its various champions. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) son of Odin is heir to the throne but is an arrogant overeager and ill-tempered rogue whose aggressive antics threaten a shaky truce between his people and the frost giants of Jotunheim one of the universe’s many realms. Odin (played with aristocratic boldness by Anthony Hopkins) enraged by his son’s blatant disregard of his orders to forgo an assault on their enemies after they attempt to reclaim a powerful artifact banishes the boy to a life among the mortals of Earth leaving Asgard defenseless against the treachery of Loki his mischievous “other son” who’s always felt inferior to Thor. Powerless and confused the disgraced Prince finds unlikely allies in a trio of scientists (Natalie Portman Stellan Skarsgard and Kat Dennings) who help him reclaim his former glory and defend our world from total destruction.
Individually the make-up visual effects CGI production design and art direction are all wondrous to behold but when fused together to create larger-than-life set pieces and action sequences the collaborative result is often unharmonious. I’m not knocking the 3D presentation; unlike 2010’s genre counterpart Clash of the Titans the filmmakers had plenty of time to perfect the third dimension and there are only a few moments that make the decision to convert look like it was a bad one. It’s the unavoidable overload of visual trickery that’s to blame for the frost giants’ icy weaponized constructs and other hybrids of the production looking noticeably artificial. Though there’s some imagery to nitpick the same can’t be said of Thor’s thunderous sound design which is amped with enough wattage to power The Avengers’ headquarters for a century.
Chock full of nods to the comics the screenplay is both a strength and weakness for the film. The story is well sequenced giving the audience enough time between action scenes to grasp the characters motivations and the plot but there are tangential narrative threads that disrupt the focus of the film. Chief amongst them is the frost giants’ fore mentioned relic which is given lots of attention in the first act but has little effect on the outcome. In addition I felt that S.H.I.E.L.D. was nearly irrelevant this time around; other than introducing Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye the secret security faction just gets in the way of the movie’s momentum.
While most of the comedy crashes and burns there are a few laughs to be found in the film. Most come from star Hemsworth’s charismatic portrayal of the God of Thunder. He plays up the stranger-in-a-strange-land aspect of the story with his cavalier but charming attitude and by breaking all rules of diner etiquette in a particularly funny scene with the scientists whose respective roles as love interest (Portman) friendly father figure (Skarsgaard) and POV character (Dennings) are ripped right out of a screenwriters handbook.
Though he handles the humorous moments without a problem Hemsworth struggles with some of the more dramatic scenes in the movie; the result of over-acting and too much time spent on the Australian soap opera Home and Away. Luckily he’s surrounded by a stellar supporting cast that fills the void. Most impressive is Tom Hiddleston who gives a truly humanistic performance as the jealous Loki. His arc steeped in Shakespearean tragedy (like Thor’s) drums up genuine sympathy that one rarely has for a comic book movie villain.
My grievances with the technical aspects of the production aside Branagh has succeeded in further exploring the Marvel Universe with a film that works both as a standalone superhero flick and as the next chapter in the story of The Avengers. Thor is very much a comic book film and doesn’t hide from the reputation that its predecessors have given the sub-genre or the tropes that define it. Balanced pretty evenly between “serious” and “silly ” its scope is large enough to please fans well versed in the source material but its tone is light enough to make it a mainstream hit.

The story of the most dominant racehorse of all time does not easily fit into the standard inspirational sports flick mold. Such films typically require its protagonists to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles be they competitive (Hoosiers) personal (The Natural) societal (Ali) or some combination of all three (Remember the Titans). But by all accounts the greatest challenges to Secretariat capturing of the 1973 Triple Crown were not rival horses — indeed Secretariat had no true rival — but a pair of slow starts and an abscess. And abscesses — apologies to dermatologists — simply aren’t all that effective as dramatic devices.
Lacking most of the vital ingredients of the traditional underdog movie formula Disney’s Secretariat is forced to synthesize them. Its screenplay written by Mike Rich and based rather loosely on the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack adopts a conventional save-the-farm framework: When her parents pass away within months of each other Denver housewife Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane) is advised to sell off her family’s Virginia-based Meadow Stables a beautiful but unprofitable horse-breeding enterprise in order to pay the onerous inheritance taxes levied by the state. But Penny her deceased father’s hackneyed horse-inspired counsel fresh in her mind (“You’ve got to run your own race ” etc. etc.) is loath to depart with such a cherished heirloom. So she concocts a scheme just idiotic enough to work betting the farm — literally — that her new horse Big Red in whom she has an almost Messianic faith will win the Kentucky Derby Preakness and Belmont races in succession.
Of course Big Red under the stage name Secretariat goes on to do just that but only after the film subjects us to nearly two hours of manufactured melodrama. Lane grasping all-too conspicuously for awards consideration treats every line as if it were the St. Crispin’s Day speech. Her character Penny exhibits a hair-trigger sensitivity to the sounds of skeptics and naysayers bursting forth with a polite rebuke and a stern sermon for anyone who dares doubt her crusade from the trash-talking owner of a rival horse to her annoyingly pragmatic husband (Dylan Walsh).
Lane isn’t alone in her grandiosity. The entire production reeks of it as director Randall Wallace lines the story with fetid chunks of overwrought Oscar bait like so many droppings in an untended stable even using Old Testament quotations and gospel music to endow Penny’s quest with biblical significance. John Malkovich is kind enough to inject some mirth into the heavy-handed proceedings hamming it up as Secretariat’s trainer Lucien Laurin a French-Canadian curmudgeon with an odd sartorial palette. It’s not enough however to alleviate the discomfort of witnessing the film's quasi-Sambo depiction of Secretariat’s famed groom Eddie Sweat (Nelsan Ellis) which reaches its cringeworthy zenith when Sweat runs out to the track on the eve of the Belmont Stakes and exclaims to no one in particular that “Big Red done eat his breakfast this mornin’!!!” Bagger Vance would be proud. Whether or not Ellis’ portrayal of Sweat’s cadence and mannerisms is accurate (and for all I know it may well be) the character is too thinly drawn to register as anything more than an amiable simple-minded servant.
Animal lovers will be happy to know that the horses in Secretariat come off looking far better than their human counterparts and not just because they’re alloted the best dialogue. In the training and racing sequences Wallace effectively conveys the strength and majesty of the fearsome animals drawing us into the action and creating a strong element of suspense even though the final result is a fait accompli. It's too bad the rest of the film never makes it out of the gate.

Green Zone is a story we’ve already heard shot in a manner we’ve already seen and starring Matt Damon in a role he’s already played. Remember those WMDs that were never found in Iraq and later exposed to be the invention of a dubious and poorly-vetted informant? Remember the misguided and hideously botched attempt at establishing democracy after the fall of Saddam and the violent prolonged insurgency that ensued? If you’ve been away from the television for the past hour and somehow managed to forget any of these details Green Zone is here to remind you.
Damon plays Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller an Army weapons inspector whose frustration over repeatedly coming up empty in his search for Iraqi WMDs leads him on a quest to track down and expose the people responsible for leading him (and us) down that infamously bogus path. Though his hand-to-hand skills are a notch below Jason Bourne’s Miller’s single-mindedness moral certainty and permanent expression of square-jawed defiance — always threatening another “How do you like them apples?” rebuke — in the face of an insidious multi-level government conspiracy are essentially equivalent to those of Damon’s Bourne trilogy soulmate.
And like Bourne his most dangerous adversary isn’t found on the battlefront but rather within the government he once served so proudly. As Miller delves ever deeper into the Case of the Faulty WMD Intelligence Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) the duplicitous arrogant Defense Department bureaucrat in charge of U.S. operations in Iraq summarily relieves him of his post. (Hint: the better dressed a Green Zone character is the more sinister his ambitions.) But Miller remains undeterred and he goes rogue to locate the CIA informant “Magellan ” a formerly high-ranking Iraqi official whose supposed confirmation of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions served as the basis for U.S. invasion.
We know how the story ends. Green Zone’s pervasive overarching sense of deja vu is accentuated by director — and veteran Bourne helmer — Paul Greengrass who employs the trademark hand-held super-shakycam style which was so fresh and inventive in 2004 but now feels stale and predictable. (Admittedly my aversion to Greengrass’ approach was no doubt heightened by a previous night’s viewing of Roman Polanski’s excellent The Ghost Writer a political thriller as subtle and precise and finely tuned as Green Zone is ham-fisted and haphazard — and which also uses the phantom WMD controversy to far greater narrative effect.)
Green Zone culminates in essentially a violent footrace between Miller and the Army Special Forces as they scour a heavily-armed insurgent stronghold to find Magellan with Miller hoping to secure his potentially damning testimony before the Army can silence him for good. The climactic sequence for all I could tell was either shot in Damon’s backyard culled from Bourne trilogy deleted scenes or assembled from scattered YouTube clips. This punishingly chaotic often incoherent and ultimately exhausting approach to storytelling isn’t cinema verite; it’s dementia pugilistica.

Top Story
Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee seem to be making a consolidated effort to contribute to a circus-like atmosphere in the custody fight over their two children. Lee is now seeking "primary physical custody" of Brandon, 6, and Dylan, 5, because Anderson's judgment is impaired, according to TheSmokingGun.com. In a declaration filed April 9 in Los Angeles Superior court, Lee claims his ex-wife filed frivolous reports with the Department of Children and Family Services, alleging "serious misconduct" by Lee. How frivolous? Their oldest son scraped his face on the side of the Jacuzzi while playing with Lee at his Malibu home, and now Anderson is using the incident to try to restrict Lee's access to the children. A hearing to modify the custody provisions is scheduled for May 15.
Celebs
Will Russian tennis vixen Anna Kournikova, who has not won a tournament in 101 attempts on the Women's Tennis Asspciation tour, win her battle with Penthouse? The magazine claims its June issue contains topless photos of Kournikova; she says the photos are fake. And she's suing to prove it, Reuters reports. Decide for yourself when the issue hits newsstands Tuesday.
Frasier star Kelsey Grammer has been ordered to pay his former talent agency $1.8 million in disputed commissions plus interest, according to The Hollywood Reporter. A federal court of appeals upheld an earlier decision from a Screen Actors Guild arbitration panel that maintained the Artists Agency was entitled to ongoing commissions from Grammer's television work after his contract expired in 1998 because the deals were negotiated while he was still a client.
Actress Tawney Kitaen, best remembered for wriggling around on the hood of a car in an '80s Whitesnake music video, has pleaded innocent to charges of domestic violence, The Associated Press reports. A June 3 pretrial hearing on two misdemeanor charges--corporal injury on a spouse and battery--is set for Kitaen, 40. Her husband is Cleveland Indians' pitcher Chuck Finley.
In the Biz
MGM and Bruce Willis' production company, Cheyenne Enterprises, have teamed up for a first-look deal for new movies and television projects from Stan Lee's POW! Entertainment, Variety reports. Superhero action pics already in consideration are The Femizons, The Double Man and Nightbird.
Director Tim Burton will direct Big Fish for Columbia Pictures, according to Variety. The film, an adaptation of the Daniel Wallace novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, focuses on a complicated father/son relationship.
Tube News
After two successful seasons, HBO has decided to renew its funeral-home series Six Feet Under for another 13 episodes, Variety reports. The show won a Golden Globe for best drama in January and continues to be one of HBO's top-ranked shows.
The series finale of Fox's Ally McBeal, which airs May 20, will apparently feature former stars of the show, including Courtney Thorne-Smith, Lisa Nicole Carson and Gil Bellows, according to zap2it.com.
Former ESPN sports anchor Craig Kilborn has signed a contract extension that will keep him on as host of The Late, Late Show for at least two more years, the AP reports. Viewership is up 25 percent in Kilborn's 12:35 a.m. time slot since he began hosting the show in 1999.
Music News
Paul McCartney won a court order Monday preventing Christie's auction house from selling his handwritten lyrics to the song "Hey Jude," according to the AP. The former Beatle claims the lyrics, which were expected to fetch up to $116,000 at an auction Tuesday, disappeared from his west London home.
The group Creed has been forced to cancel the remaining dates on their tour after lead singer Scott Stapp was injured in a car accident in the Orlando, Fla., area, the AP reports. Other details were not immediately known, but a spokesman for the band said, "We don't want people to believe that this is a situation where Scott will not recover."
Grammy winner R. Kelly says he will fight a third civil lawsuit that claims he had sex with an underage girl, the AP reports. Lawyers for Kelly, who has settled two similar civil suits in the past, said that "the cash machine is closed."